Information seeking and use by newspaper journalists

Reports an interview study into information seeking and use by journalists at a national British newspaper. Describes work activity in the context of a series of behaviour shaping constraints and cognitive and external resources. Describes the journalist’s information seeking as motivated by originality checking (of the angle), developing a personal understanding, discovering/confirming potential content and also describes information gathering and managing multiple information spaces. Shows how these are motivated by context, facilitated by resources, and how they enrich the journalist’s resource space. Also shows that journalistic work is uncertain as a function of an uncertain context and their continually evolving plans. These result in provisional and unstable relevance judgments, and, during later stages, the reinitiating of preparatory information seeking activities, including the relocation and review of previously read documents. At the end presents a model to summarise the findings. Introduction Research in information science has seen the emergence of a trend, identified by Dervin and Nilan (1986), of exploring the contexts of information seeking and use. A number of key features are characteristic of this approach; these include the aim of being receptive to differences manifest in different information seeking and use situations, extending the focus of research beyond users’ information system encounters to the wider context of use, exploring user’s cognition as well as observable behaviour, and frequently adopting qualitative methodologies to provide rich accounts of the information behaviours of smaller groups of individuals. A number of researchers working within this paradigm have the studied information seeking and use as it occurs within work situations. For example, Ellis and Haugan (1997) report on the information seeking patterns of engineers and industrial research scientists. Their description is embedded within a detailed account of different project types and project phases. In the context of these, the authors identify eight major information seeking activities or “characteristics”: